


The Loneliest Rose

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Death, Doomed Timelines, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Sad, Suicide, decomposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 17:37:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5635810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Rose went through after Dave went galavanting off into the past to become Davesprite.  That doomed timeline lasted a long, long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Loneliest Rose

The loneliest Rose, no trolls and no humans around her.  Occasionally she sits outside amid the rain, getting glimpses of an absent cat and a deranged puppet that have no further purpose in the void session as they scamper around the edges of a world stuck in stasis.  The only truly living things left are the consorts and agents who will never finish their battle.  She went to sleep as Dave reversed, but she woke up again only to discover that she must keep going.  To what, to where?  Will a slit to her wrists get her where she wants to go?  She no longer has answers.  

With her own company she whittles away at her quests, pecking out the last dregs of her walkthrough as an epitaph to herself.  All of it buzzes on her lips, like an invitation to laugh with an old chum.  It’s so strange to find the answers she puzzled over for months.  At every turn she can’t help but glance at her laptop, to tell Dave that hey, she figured it out all along.  He always fails to be there.  She finally stands victorious over her denizen, but she feels no joy.  In silence she goes in search of all the others’ denizens.  Without Jade, the place the forge should be is cold and useless, eternally bitten with frost and rage.  The planet, prepared as it was for their fourth member, sighs and groans like a mourning widow.  No one comes out to greet her.  Rose takes care of the monster underneath the surface in the most merciful way she can–it seems to accept its fate in a way she finds despicable.  

On to Dave’s.  It’s like scorched soot by now, the flames burning and burning again, eating each other up in an ouroboros of insatiable hunger.  His denizen, too, she kills, but she begins to wonder now.  There were footprints on the roof–not new, but much bigger than any thirteen-year-old’s. They were the residue of someone in rubber-soled shoes, a lone figure who, like her, traversed the hellscape to leave behind nothing but the remains of monsters and the melted shapes of futile steps across the heat.  

She lays the head of the denizen down to rest, retreats to the relative safety of the Strider apartment.  She inspects the footprints.  They were old, yes… she follows them anyway.

Losing sight of the path is something she knew would happen, but when the trail ends she finds that she doesn’t feel crushed by the knowledge that Bro Strider must have jumped on his hoverboard and shot away into the past of LOHAC somewhere.  In fact, the news does the opposite--for the first time in she doesn’t know how long, her lungs fill up fully.  She has a purpose.  If Bro was here, concrete, in the flesh… and her mother, with a length of rope and the glass of vodka left enticingly on the end of a dock… if they were here, then they might still be somewhere, waiting to be found.  

For now, though, John’s denizen.  She came for this one last, leery of discovering the grisly, gnarled bones of her dear friend, but when she arrives she finds nothing amiss.  The palace is empty, the chambers echoing with the docile sounds of salamanders who shudder under the weight of the dark, oppressive skies that refuse to lift, even with the absence of the monster.  And the monster… she sighs.  Someone has already been here.  She finds two graves marked with stone minitablets under the lowest portion of the palace.  One tablet sits ascant atop a dreadful incision in the earth, a monstrous etching fit only to receive the most regal of beasts.  The other is pitifully small, cracked in half, the pieces lying neatly in the dust.  His name, Johnathan Egbert, is carved with such care that for a moment Rose can only gasp.  It strikes her memories, brings crashing forth years and years of passive-aggressive battles with her mother.  She thinks that a headstone is, perhaps, a little different from a bronzed vacuum cleaner.

She has nothing to leave that isn’t black or tattered except the purple band on her head.  Its bright, fervent color strikes the floor as she leaves the tomb behind.

She searches.  Day and night for a long, long time.  She finds scraps of people she desperately wants to meet--a sword tip, wedged in stone.  The stained rings from many a cool, sweating glass of alcohol.  Hats and shoes, crumpled and discarded.  The scorched earth from a gun she suspects is larger than she is.  Foot in front of foot she keeps going, wearier and wearier, grasping at images that remain just a step beyond the grasp of her powers.  And why not?  She has no Knight to give her speed, no Witch to give her strength.  With the Heir she could have slipped through the troubles, light as the air, but all she has at her disposal is light.  Coiling, blinding, so much light that she can hardly see for the reflections.  It pierces her, like shafts of metal.  She weeps in the night, daunted by the brilliant arcs of illumination that never seem to cease, never seem to slow.  She can’t breathe for the light.

It’s been years, or perhaps decades, when she decides to take matters into her own hands.  She can’t believe she didn’t think of it sooner, but of course she knows why--she can’t stand the idea of knowing, finally and terminally, what’s going to happen to her.  Whether this torment is going to end, how, and if… if any sliver of her will survive to tell the woeful tale.  She decides it doesn’t matter, and goes to sit with the White Queen.

The answers she get don’t mean much.  Over tea, she discovers that what she seeks will not be found in the confines of the incipisphere.  The game, its functions set, will keep ticking until there is no one left.  Rose stirs some fresh carapace honey into her tea and waits.  The White Queen knows a lot, yes, but she doesn’t know everything, the wizened old monarch says.  She shows Rose first the body of a man, decaying in the oil slicks of LOWAS.  He was old when he arrived, it seemed, and the years dragged on relentless.  An enormous firearm lies across his chest, protecting him even in death.  He was discovered by a carapace called the Parcel Mistress, the Queen says.  They marked his body according to regulations.  Rose nods.  Next the Queen shows her a fatherly figure in dress pants and tie.  The tie, made of the finest tie materials, is secured to a tree branch just outside the Egbert residence.  He hangs, his cuffs scuffed to hell and back, one shoe missing and his face unshaven.  Rose quietly tucks her skirt underneath her, head bowed in respect.  He was valiant, for sure, but she cannot blame him for the path he took.

She waits for more, but the Queen hesitates.  Perhaps, the White Queen says, you should visit someone else.  Rose stands and follows the old, hunched woman through the castle and, to her surprise, finds them in a room with another regal crown.  The White Queen sits laboriously, settling her tentacles and frills beside the woman who should be her sworn enemy.  Rose walks to the armchair across from them, staring into the black, alien eyes of the Black Queen.  Have you come to accept my deal, the Black Queen asks of the White.  The White Queen laughs as if she has never heard anything so trite in her life.  They sit together, the fettered leftovers of a session doomed to failure, and their snide remarks to each other are the dregs of a hatred that spanned more than anger and more than love.  They are aged in the humor of doom.

There are others, you know.  The Black Queen’s words to Rose are like a splash of water to the face.  Desperate, so acutely desperate, Rose demands where to find Bro and her Mother, but the Black Queen brushes her long, pointed fingers through the air, brushing off the words.  Not humans, she says.  Others.  If you really want to escape, then you must do what the White Queen and King will not--go to the Outer Gods and beg.

Rose leaves with the sting of light cuts on her hands from where the Black Queen traced the instructions to summon a God.  Her mother, she’s been told, has been missing for a long time.  The breadcrumb trail of bottles ran out some time ago, and though agents were sent out in hordes, she was nowhere to be found.  Rose makes sure to check the dungeons and cell blocks of both Derse and Prospit before she goes, but of course her mother isn’t there--she supposes it’s for the better.  But there is still one person she hopes to see.

She finds him where the footprints end.  He’s ready to be found, she supposes, as she sits beside him at the top of the rainbow waterfall at the foot of her childhood home.  She doesn’t know how he knows to be there, but she’s somehow glad that he is.  Calsprite is draped across his shoulders, the first time she’s seen the puppet in years.  She waits to see if the orange monstrosity is going to start laughing, the anguished sound that drove Dave back to the past, but both the puppet and the man are silent.

She takes the moment to examine him, the first human she’s seen since Dave.  He looks an awful lot like the Strider she knew.  Short, curly hairs that stick to the back of his neck and his temples, the rest carefully straightened and styled.  Eyes obscured by dark, brooding lenses, but not quite enough to cover the slight quirks of the eyebrows.  His skin is aged, fine lines beginning to crease the corners of his eyes and mouth, barely visible under a dusting of coarse gingery beard.  She can only wonder what her own face looks like.  When was the last time she examined herself?  Perhaps when she typed up the last of her walkthrough.

In any case, now that he’s here she doesn’t quite know what she wants to say.  That Dave is the bravest person she ever knew, or that it wasn’t supposed to go like this, or that she plans to finally end this never ending nightmare tonight, before she has to live through another day?  She suspects that he knows all these things already.  She suspects that she’s overthinking.  Her final encounter with another living, breathing person and she’s going to squander it away in cerebral convulsions.  That certainly figures.  A short lifetime of being alone is enough to drain even the best conversationalist of useful words, and she was hardly the best.  She hugs her knees, wanting to somehow express the pain of being left behind but knowing that she never will.  He sits, a sentinel beside her, the muscles of his back bunched and tight under his miraculously white shirt.  Without glancing over she knows that he’s waiting for Skaia to rise over the horizon, the Medium’s version of dawn.  She decides, then, that she’ll wait, too.  It’s easier than she thinks it will be--she was so ready to get on with her demise, but the small moments of predawn light stretch and breathe in a motion she remembers only from life before John’s death.

It can only last so long, though.  Her hands begin to itch, the cuts seem to darken like oozing ink on her skin.  With no words she stands, raises her hands to the sky, and waits for the black miasma to exude from the world around them.  Like a beast of prey, a sharp-taloned vulture, the black reaches, and she steps forward.  The color seems to seep from the ground, the constant flickering light of the waterfall buffered until it feels like no photons move at all.  The air gets cold.  LOLAR seems to stop spinning, iced over with a fetal sludge of baby horrorterrors.  The slime supports her weight.  She only pauses a moment to look back at the golden silhouette behind her.  Then she, like the rest of the tattered world, is swallowed up.

The last remnants of the Loneliest Rose dissipate into Paradox Space.  Her decisions are methodically taken apart, categorized by the Incipisphere itself.  Her memories are spread across her dream-self’s psyche in fragments.  Her ghost finds its way to an afterlife, a soap bubble of the gods, one of any number that drift across time and space.  A doomed timeline is not wasted--the bits and pieces are used like interchangeable cogs, swapped out into new timelines until one, the Alpha, happens to extend with all the gears in the right order.  This Rose leaves her mark on the universe, no matter how small.

No matter if it’s just the last few paragraphs of a walkthrough, tucked away in a hidden folder beside the rest of the document where no one else will ever see how broken she was.


End file.
